ARC/SAR/JAR 2 – have you created your first weave yet?

The Swiss city of Bern, official home to the Society for Artistic Research, was host to a large delegation of members from the ARC/SAR/JAR conglomerate come together for an update on where we are at with this important project. A previous post discussed the entities here, a brief recapitulation would explain the society (SAR) as a body that exists to publish the journal (JAR), with the Artistic Research Catalog (ARC) being the work group that helps set up the software platform from which the actual Research Catalog and JAR will operate. (Submission for JAR will have to be formatted to fit the Research Catalog first.) The whole operation started a year ago and ARC should be finished in twelve months from now. Then it will just be the Research Catalog and SAR publishing JAR.

The SAR activities in Bern were of a mostly administrative nature (voting a new executive board, informing members of ARC’s and JAR’s status, etc.) and JAR was present via a party celebrating its first issue. The main impact of the Bern meeting was to be felt in the fact that the eagerly awaited beta version of the ARC software was introduced. Some of the ARC coordinators (who oversee individual researchers trying out  the platform), including yours truly, gave a presentation of their own first attempts and findings, some workshop sessions were to ensure that the necessary information and knowhow to operate the platform can be passed on to the many researchers associated with ARC in the next few months.

This is going to be big. For the first time, really, musician researchers will be able to publish findings with sound and video as well as basically unlimited bytes of scores. The latter is at once the Achilles heel of JAR, but that should not spoil the fun yet. I, for one, can hardly imaging publishing anything on paper anymore. A book with a CD/DVD included? Forget it: that’s like developing apps for the telegraph. It is true that personal websites offer at least as many possibilities, but JAR will be peer reviewed, and that makes it the first potential quality control standard for published artistic research in music.

Have a look at JAR-0, and I am sure you’ll be convinced. But you’ll also notice that the future music researcher will not be adequately set up anymore with just a friend who is willing to read through his article before submission for the sake of linguistic and structural soundness. He will now have to scout for additional and new types of friends: those who have experience in lay-out design. Lay-out for paper publications is done by the designers that work for the publication; with JAR, the submitting researcher has to make many choices himself, before sending in his work. If it has already been found that it is not because visual artists are good at their art that they will be good at web-layout, than the consequences for musicians will be multiple.

Coming back to the copyright issue: JAR did a good job in finding a way to secure its own position against potential infringement litigation. But it shoved the hot potato into the hands of the researcher. How many will take risks, warranting that they have secured the rights when in many cases they will not even be able to do so? Existing laws do not adequately meet the demands of paper publishing, they certainly do not provide for the scale that JAR users will want to operate on.

Another worry is the peer review process, especially the choice of criteria for the visual arts submissions. Yet, the need for something like JAR is so great that attention may explode regardless of such worries.

The end of the tunnel is in sight: when the bugs are gone and newly discovered needs are met, we’ll be able to put all our research into the catalog for anyone to assess, have a first discipline-specific journal format, and see other publishers get a license to use the same platform. 

This feels really good.

Oh, and to find out what a ‘weave’ is, log in here. It all looks complicated, for sure, but you had better get used to it: it’s going to be the future!

ARC & JAR & SAR

A few days ago, I attended a meeting in Gothenburg, Sweden, on furthering the work to set up the Artistic Research Catalog, an on-line workspace that aims at developing a high standard of referencing, storing and documenting artistic research projects.

The core forces behind this project are the Bern and The Hague Universities of the Arts, supported by a host of institutions from The Netherlands, Britain, Switzerland, Germany, the US and pan-European consortia such as the European Association of Conservatories, the European Society for Literature, Science and the Arts, and the European League of Institutes of the Arts.

Several meetings with many individuals representing these institutions are set up to gage the needs of the generic artistic researcher in order to develop the software that would attain the sought after standard. As most of the members of this project are from the visual arts sector (including representation of the art of design, of architecture and of some interdisciplinary orientations), with Dutch improviser Peter van Bergen, Flemish composer Paul Craenen and me representing music, there is a distinct gravitational force weighing in on the exchange of ideas. The imbalance has not only its effect on the topics of the discussions but on the terminology as well (‘exposition’ / ‘works’), and hence on the concepts with which the software developers will work. It remains to be seen how efficient it will be to insist on merging audio and visual culture in such an enterprise. The problem is of course inherently linked to the notion that ARC wants to be a bottom-up enterprise, interested in learning from existing artistic research projects to know what researchers and artists require for the storage and publication of their work. Apart from the ongoing or unsettled debate on what constitutes artistic research in music, making it difficult to know the wishes of the generic researcher, there are many less artistic researchers in music than in the visual arts, where the notion has been entertained more widely and for a longer period already.

Fortunately, it has been decided that a prototype of the software will be available soon for the members of this initial phase to work with and learn from. That should speed things up, so I am looking forward to seeing what is possible and what is lacking. Only then will we find out what we want this catalog to do for us.

The software is meant to be open source so that other initiatives can use it as well. If the idea of more than one such catalog based on this software is still not more than a concept, one project is being developed to use this digital ARC platform as we speak: the Journal for Artistic Research. More on JAR can be read here. The first issue is planned for publication in the coming months – it is said to be a ‘zero-issue’, probably meaning that the double-blind peer review standard will be used from the next issue onwards. The publisher of JAR is the Society for Artistic Research, of which a little information is to be read here.

As much as SAR would seem to be fundamental to both the other enterprises, it appears to be least active and only be called into existence to work out JAR, which in turn needs ARC to function. As ARC is a two-year project (at least if the supporting grant is not renewed or replaced with alternate financing) already in the beginning of its second year, it is not clear how and by whom the catalog will be exploited as an independent workspace for researchers once it is up and running. For the time being, it looks like JAR is the real aim of the community that called it into life. As for SAR, there is much potential still to be tapped. If the number of artistic researchers is still small, it feels great enough to start acting like a society, exploring its critical mass far beyond creating a channel to disseminate its findings. But the impetus is there and soon the first exploits will make history.